U.S. vulnerable to 'most terrifying' ISIS tactic

Israel faced a stunning new challenge from its age-old Islamic enemies in last summer’s Gaza war, one that, if successful, would have led to unspeakable human carnage.

It’s the same challenge an IDF officer and author of a new book says America will soon be facing and is not nearly as prepared to repel.

Hamas’ attack strategy in July 2014 went beyond the standard rocket barrage on Israeli cities. A brazen plan to send hundreds of heavily armed terrorists through tunnels in Gaza up into Israel’s population centers almost succeeded, says Capt. Dan Gordon, veteran of six wars and member of the Israeli Defense Forces’ advanced sniper team.

“I’ve been in six Middle Eastern wars, including the one last summer in Israel,” says Gordon, who has a home in Arizona, where, when he’s not fighting wars, he works as a screenwriter for Hollywood productions and recently completed a new book, “Day of the Dead Book One: Gaza.”

He has an upcoming sequel “Day of the Dead Book Two: America.”

In that sequel, he presents a chilling message for America that he hopes will be taken as more than a mere work of fiction.

‘Like zombies coming up out of the ground’

“That war (in Gaza) ushered in something that was really the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen in my life, and that is terrorist attack tunnels that went underneath the recognized 1948 borders of Israel from Gaza…and all of a sudden it was like Night of the Living Dead,” he said in a recent Fox News interview. “Your lawn opens up, and like zombies coming up out of the ground, a dozen terrorists armed with RPGs, machine guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, hand-grenades, tranquilizer shots and handcuffs, meant to take women and children hostage, kill and maim as many as possible and then drag others back into Gaza as hostages.”

The plot was foiled by alert Israeli military watchmen who monitor the border 24/7 with the help of drones and other aerial assets.

Gordon told WND the Middle East often serves as a “research and development lab” for terrorist innovations. What starts there often spreads to the rest of the world.

Sure enough, a little online research will turn up articles about the “tunnel warfare” strategy now being deployed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and various Islamist groups in North Africa.

The proliferation of tunnel warfare in the Middle East is discussed at length in a recent article at DefenseOne.com.

Daniel Rubenstein’s article for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs describes in depth the Hamas plot to bring more than 200 terrorists up from Gaza tunnels into Israeli cities and how dangerously close they came to pulling it off.

But the most vulnerable country to tunnel attacks is not Israel, Gordon says. It is the United States.

ISIS operatives are likely already inside America, but nobody knows how many, where, or in what capacity.

“Did they come in from tunnels? I doubt it, because they don’t need to, our border is so porous, and they could easily come across the southern border as thousands of people do every day,” Gordon said. “And they could have Western passports from a country which requires no visa. My guess is there are ISIS fighters in the country doing advance scouting, studying all the preliminary things a professional terror attack takes into account, because a professional terrorist attack takes months to set up.”

Gordon gets inside the mind of a terrorist like no other author since Tom Clancy.

“You surveil the target, you look for ingress and egress routes, you study response times, you look at what you plan to do after the first attack,” he said. “Do you set off a bomb and then detonate another after the first responders arrive? Or, do you launch a second attack simultaneously on another side of town? So my guess is there is advance scouts planning all this as we speak.”

But when it comes time to launch the big attack, that’s when the tunnels come into play.

ISIS’s job will be made easier by the fact that an established drug-smuggling tunnel system into the U.S. from Mexico already exists.

“ISIS has billions of dollars. They’re the richest terror organization in the history of the world. They don’t’ have to dig a tunnel they just have to rent one,” Gordon told WND. “Money is a language the drug cartels understand. There are tunnels that go from Tijuana, Mexico, into San Diego. We have found other tunnels that go from Mexico into southern Arizona, and from Mexico into portions of El Paso, Texas, and one has to assume there are tunnels we don’t know about.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/06/u-s-vulnerable-to-most-terrifying-isis-tactic/#fQpUSfDRoSOFmdFj.99